Respect the rice cooker
Words by Anais Corrales
Photograph by Melissa Brown
As the rapid-fire pace of exciting panels and lectures of SCAD Style week comes to a close, the SCAD Museum of Art might have saved the best for last. Donald Norman of The Nielson Norman Group, author of “The Design of Everyday Things,” is a revolutionary thinker in modern design and technology and is regarded as one of the Top 27 Most Influential Designers in the world by Businessweek.
The 78-year-old also serves as “distinguished visiting professor” at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His lecture “Why Rice Cookers are Exciting” offered a unique perspective on how design and technology intersect and how young designers can be inspired by everyday life.
It may sound odd for an academic who focuses on cognitive science to offer up his thoughts on design to students of an art-focused school. But Norman proved to have a personal aesthetic when it comes to ideas about design. Norman is a strong believer and practitioner of “user-centered design.” He expressed a need for a simplification in the application of design by streamlining the structure of tasks employed by technology. More simply: when it comes to design, the user comes first.
As Norman graced the stage of the SCAD MOA theater, he had the look of your typical scholarly professor, or an academic Santa Claus: gray hair and matching beard, round spectacles, black blazer, chambray button-down tucked into jeans and beat up tennis shoes. He paced across the stage with ease, striking a conversational tone with the crowd of design students who came to hear his ideas on design.
“Do devices take away joy?” Norman mused.
He began discussing the age-old problem associated with the rise of machinery in the modern age: can we really take pride in making something if we have machines that can do it for us? Norman related this to the proverbial rice cooker by emphasizing how the machine simplifies the task of cooking by “taking care of the dull and unimportant stuff.”
He then asked, “Is automation taking away our skills?”
Well, not exactly. Norman envisions a world where we don’t rely on either man or machine. Rather, it is the unity of these two entities that will pave our path to our future.
“That’s why I find rice cookers so exciting,” said Norman. “It’s a subtle indicator of what’s happening in the future. We just don’t notice it.”
So where does design fit into Norman’s idyllic vision of what’s to come? The true purpose of design, according to Norman, is simply to understand people. As students of design, it’s our responsibility to use design as a bridge between technology and people. We can use our design skills and apply everything we know toward making life better for people. Norman added that an understanding of the arts allows us to make design more enjoyable and pleasurable for the user. We should all take note of the humble rice cooker, as Norman argued the best revolutions are the kind that creep along slowly and quietly.
Every student has probably heard it before: relationships made across different majors are some of the most beneficial. In Norman’s mind there is no limit to the possibilities of creating and designing in different fields of design. When speaking about the different facets of design housed within SCAD, he said, “Graphic design, visual design, interactive design, fiber design, fashion design — the boundaries we create among these are arbitrary. There are no boundaries.”
Communicating and connecting with students from different majors can prove to be one of the most creative endeavors a student can undertake. An interdisciplinary mindset is an incredibly useful asset for design.
He closed out the lecture with strong words that all young designers can take to heart: “You need to learn about topics you know nothing about. Be fast learners. Ask stupid questions. I want to encourage you all to ask stupid questions because those are the best possible questions you can ask.”
